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The post interval battle

The eight day gap between the end of the second Test in Mumbai and the start of the third in Kolkata is longer than any for India (during a series) in recent memory. While it has allowed the tension to build in a nicely simmering series, the flipside is the amount of dross generated by large parts of the media about the team in general and Dhoni and Tendulkar in particular which is taking attention away from what's turning out to be a great series to watch.

Now I'm not an apologist for either of them and fully agree that they have dug themselves into holes of their own making primarily. Tendulkar should probably have retired at the end of the Australia tour along with Dravid and Laxman paving the way for one of Rohit Sharma or Manoj Tiwary (or both) to be tested at home over ten Test matches before the series of away tours from the end of 2013. And while Dhoni is easily the fittest cricketer on the planet, the burden of captaining India across all three formats (two of which the team is struggling quite a lot in) as well as captaining the Super Kings in the IPL and the Champions League means that he is left with no time to refresh and re-energize himself mentally. The fact remains though that his performances as captain are slightly better than when not leading the side (in both Tests and ODIs) so even though in my opinion, he'd be better off at least quitting international T20s, he clearly thinks otherwise.

What continues to amaze me (though it probably shouldn't) is the fact that Indian fans and the media still seem to be stuck in the 1990s and deal only in extremes. Ergo, the two most popular Indian cricketers in the last two decades are suddenly the biggest villains and the main causes for an underperforming team? A look at the rest of the players who made up the XIs in the first two Tests is instructive. Pujara and Ojha come out with flying colours and the fact that we are at 1-1 is largely down to the two of them. Ashwin and Yadav have not done too badly either especially given they are still quite new to Test cricket, though the latter had a bit of an off game with the ball in the second Test. But these chaps are the newest faces in the team. What about the other experienced folks? Between them, Sehwag, Gambhir, Yuvraj, Zaheer, and Harbhajan have played 377 Tests. Each of them is below 35 and yet they have done little so far in the series apart from Sehwag's opening day ton. Why should they not all be dropped especially given they did poorly through the 0-8 annihilation in England and Australia? But no, Dhoni and Tendulkar are who get the assured headlines/eyeballs and hence are easy targets.

Sample this: all Dhoni has done is ask for pitches that help him target an opposition's clear weakness. Aside from Cook, Pietersen, and Prior, none of the English batsmen have remotely looked like they fancy playing spin bowling and so it would be stupid of Dhoni not to want to exploit this. But no, Greg Chappell suggests that Dhoni's mind is in disorder and Nirmal Shekhar (who I used to think was an intelligent writer growing up) first goes on about how unnatural "designer" pitches in India are and then lays into the skipper with a bunch of presumptuous nonsense. After what happened in Mumbai, they (and several others) are probably going to town with the "I told you so" and "This was bound to backfire sometime" comments but if I were Dhoni I would be tempted to respond like Val Kilmer in The Ghost and The Darkness about the theory being a sound one. The fact that the English spinners are more experienced internationally than Ashwin and Ojha doesn't mean that trying to exploit their weakness is a mistake. Its his batsmen that let him down more in the second Test and Dhoni shouldn't really cop the blame for that.

One of those batsmen struggling mightily currently is Tendulkar. Ricky Ponting's retirement while going through a similar slump (and that of Laxman before him) ratchets the pressure up on Tendulkar one more notch. No one in the cricketing world has faced more pressure through his career though so I'd be surprised if Tendulkar buckles. He might well decide to quit and it might be the right decision too but in my view he's earned the right to decide his end game. As Kumble and Dileep Premachandran put it (much better than I can), criticism is all fine so long as its fair and respectful. But from the general Indian media (with a few notable exceptions) that is probably too much to ask for.

Yellow journalism aside, the larger picture though is that the series is still 1-1 with all to play for in the next two matches. Apart from a handful of batsmen and bowlers (Cook, Pujara, Swann, Ojha, Panesar), one great innings (Pietersen), and a few good ones (Sehwag, Gambhir, Prior) the reality is that the two matches so far have been lopsided games between equally flawed teams. The team that manages to plug more holes in a shorter period of time will therefore likely emerge victorious at the end. To paraphrase Michael Douglas from the same film, England showed their getting up plan when they were hit. Now its up to Dhoni's men to do the same.

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